MADISON, Wis. (AP) - The Wisconsin Department of Justice has mailed the last of thousands of untested sexual assault evidence kits to private laboratories for analysis, Attorney General Brad Schimel said as he sought to blunt criticism that he’s been moving too slowly on testing.
Schimel told reporters during a news conference outside the Dane County Rape Crisis Center in Madison that the agency put the last 48 kits in the mail Tuesday. He again pledged that all of the kits would be tested by the end of 2018.
Tens of thousands of sexual assault evidence kits have gone untested across the country for a variety of reasons. Prosecutors may have decided cases were too weak to pursue or been forced to drop cases because victims wouldn’t cooperate. Victim advocacy groups have been pushing states since 2014 to analyze the kits in the hopes of developing DNA profiles and identifying serial offenders.
Schimel started a project in 2016 to test unanalyzed kits sitting on Wisconsin police department and hospital shelves. The DOJ has identified 6,800 kits to date and is working to test 4,155 of them. It chose not to test the remaining kits because victims in those cases wouldn’t consent to analysis or prosecutors already had won a conviction in the cases.
The DOJ has received about $7 million in grants for the initiative from the U.S. Department of Justice and the New York district attorney’s office.
According to a DOJ news release, testing had been completed on 1,884 kits as of Tuesday with 2,271 kits still in line for analysis. Tests on 75 kits have yielded a DNA match with a profile in the FBI’s database. The effort has led to charges against two people so far.
Schimel reiterated that all testing would be completed by January, a promise he made months ago. He noted that state crime lab reviews of the private labs’ work would continue beyond the end of the year, however.
Democrats have spent months ripping Schimel, a Republican, for moving too slowly on testing.
Former federal prosecutor Josh Kaul, who is running against Schimel, issued a news release Tuesday pointing out that testing still hasn’t been completed on more than half of the kits. He accused Schimel of failing to prioritize the testing and leaving dangerous criminals on the streets.
“This is not leadership,” state Democratic Party Chairwoman Martha Laning said in her own release Tuesday. “This is more of Brad Schimel dragging his feet on an issue that should have demand (sic) his full attention long ago.”
Schimel responded during his news conference that it took time to inventory kits and review cases to qualify for the grant money.
Other states have launched their own testing initiatives, jamming up private laboratories, he added. The DOJ put out a request for bids in March 2016 but got just one taker, Bode Cellmark Forensics Laboratory, and that lab couldn’t start testing until January 2017.
The agency has since secured contracts with two more labs, Sorenson Forensics in Utah and Marshall University Forensics Science Center, this past January.
“We have moved this process as quick as we can given the circumstances we face,” Schimel said.
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